Is California Showing the Future of Politics?

Just a few years ago, California was a laughingstock. It was nearly bankrupt, its infrastructure was crumbling, and you couldn’t get the two political parties to agree on anything.

Sound familiar? Kinda like our national politics now?

Just two years ago, the idea that California could be a global model for anything was laughable. When Brown took office, the state was staggered by double-digit unemployment, a $26 billion deficit and an accumulated “wall of debt” topping $35 billion. California was a punch line for Republican politicos – a cautionary tale, they said, of the fate that awaits the nation should it embrace Left Coast-style economic, social and environmental liberalism. On the campaign trail in 2012, Mitt Romney joked that “America is going to become like Greece, or like Spain, or Italy, or like . . . California.”

But today you don’t hear much about California, and that’s good! So what happened? In 2011, Governor Moonbeam, AKA Jerry Brown, was reelected and with a huge dose of progressive politics has completely turned the state around.

The California that Brown inherited on his return to office appeared to be an insolvent, ungovernable mess. California’s finances have been out of wack since the late 1970s, when right-wing, anti-tax activists passed Prop 13, a constitutional cap on property taxes that also requires a two-thirds supermajority vote to raise any tax through the state legislature. Moreover, it was a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who hastened the recent fiscal calamity by slashing California’s vehicle license fee. Promising to cut the “car tax” keyed Schwarzenegger’s victory over the hapless Democrat Gray Davis in the recall election of 2003. But it also blew a $4 billion annual hole in the budget that Schwarzenegger simply papered over with bond debt.

With a stiff cocktail of budget cuts and hard-won new taxes, Brown has not only zeroed out the deficit, he’s also begun paying down the debt.

However, the revival of California was also made possible by the collapse of the Republican Party in the state.

The land that gave us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, tax revolts and the nation’s harshest three-strikes laws, California was a reliable red state in presidential elections from the late Sixties through the 1980s. But in a script that should sound familiar to anyone who follows national politics, California Republicans undermined their own easy dominance of state politics by moving abruptly to the right, alienating the state’s increasingly urban and Latino population with harsh stands on social issues and get-tough immigration laws.

In short, Golden State Republicans have been locked in the same “demographic death spiral” that South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham says haunts the national party: They’re too old, too white and too rural in a state that’s trending young, multicultural and urban. … In the 2012 election, the party all but crashed and burned, as voters elected a Democratic supermajority in the legislature, rendering the GOP moot.

So maybe there is hope for the rest of us?

Yes, Brown raised taxes, despite warnings from right-wing ideologues that higher taxes would send millionaires running for the borders and cripple California’s job creators. Instead, the unemployment rate has tumbled, Silicon Valley is going gangbusters, and the housing market has recovered. “Entrepreneurs are doing so well, in fact, that state coffers got an unexpected bump this spring, thanks to a windfall of $4.5 billion, largely from capital gains.”

At the same time, Brown has launched ambitious new projects, including plans to require California to generate one-third of its power from renewable sources by 2020, and power 15% of its automobiles from electricity by 2025. California has launched its own “Cap and Trade” carbon-pollution trading market and is aggressively fighting climate change.

Brown is increasing funding for education, is funding a high-speed rail line connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, and is making massive improvements to safeguard California’s water supply.

California is also leading the nation in the implementation of Obamacare. And instead of raising prices, even with Obamacare’s expanded benefits and without subsidies, a 25-year-old can buy health insurance for $141 a month (and 40-year-olds for $219).

Bottom line?

Today, Brown’s unique mix of fiscal restraint and big-government ambition has not only righted California, it could provide a model for Democrats nationally. Most thought-provoking: Brown is proving that a government that lives within its means can simultaneously pursue bold, liberal policies and programs. “Without fiscal responsibility, no other progress is possible,” says Gov. O’Malley of Maryland. “I’m hugely impressed with Jerry Brown.”

This was written by Iron Knee. Posted on Saturday, September 7, 2013, at 12:34 am. Filed under Irony. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

7 Comments

ebdoug wrote:

As I keep saying “Do away with Bush’s tax cuts to the rich” this from someone who saved $5000 on my taxes, not because I’m rich, but because of my income from investments that I don’t have to go to work to earn. I’ve been on this soap box since he put in the cuts. This is my country settled by my ancestors in the early 1600s. I want my country to be properly taken care of. Not the haves and the have nots.

Great issue, IK! I will be forwarding it intact — all three items are too good not to share. Nice work!

But I have a stylistic complaint. When your article is composed of quotes, I shouldn’t have to use the [unidentified] link to find out what you’re quoting. Just mentioning Rolling Stone would have been plenty.

*grinning* If you were running a tea-party site, of course, there’d be no need to source anything. But you know how picky us wild-eyed-socialist types can be about footnotes!

Obviously not, since going there was the only way I could’ve found out that it was a Rolling Stone piece — which I enjoyed, BTW.

But it’s not fair to Rolling Stone to quote from them without a credit when you do, dontcha think? I for one would still have gone there to read the article, even if I’d known who you were quoting. But it’s likely I was in the minority on this one.

In theory, the link tells you who you’re quoting. So there’s no real need to include it in the body of your text. That said, I didn’t click the link or roll over it or anything like that, so I had no idea.

Maybe I’m using outdated journalistic reflexes. It’s so easy to just say something like “as [author] noted in Rolling Stone,” or “[author]’s piece [title] in the current [publication]”. It just seems polite, especially when a piece consists entirely of quotes from an article.

IK’s piece was actually quite perfect in its summation of the RS article, and much easier to send on than a giant RS in-depth wallow. But it’s just a little rude not to attribute, as well as link.

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[…] nearly bankrupt, infrastructure was crumbling, and the government was completely gridlocked. But as I reported a month ago, nobody is teasing California any more. Their economy is going gangbusters, there is no more […]